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Maybe if it had gone on longer. I read the paperback a few days ago, and it's emblematic of a lot of '70s Marvel -- a little psychedelic in spots; a little pretentious in at least as many spots; ambitious but flawed. I'd say it reads like editorial interference fucked the book up if it weren't for the fact that, um, Steve Gerber edited it. Hence, I can only conclude that it was plotted almost completely on the fly, and that Gerber probably didn't have any better idea thirty years ago what the "secret" of Omega was than I do today.
The first half of the series starts out strong with a genuinely spooky opening issue that crosscuts between a precocious/solemn earth kid and the alien superhero Omega, who's on his homeworld fighting a losing battle with the dark forces of...uh...well, we don't quite know, but they sure seem evil and threatening. Omega doesn't say anything, but there's a whole lot of slightly purple captioning that lets us know just how doomed and shitty he feels about the whole thing. In, um, great detail. Meanwhile, the earth kid's parents are killed in a car accident, but not before they get the chance to reveal themselves to their "son" as robots and MELT BEFORE HIS VERY EYES. Okay, then. By issue's end, some link between the kid and Omega has been established -- Omega's extraterrestrial attackers come after the kid for no clear reason, and the kid demonstrates (to his own surprise) abilities similar to the hero's -- and, logically, you presume that the rest of the series will explore that link, what all it entails, and how it came to be.
Except, of course, that's not what happens at all. What happens is, Omega fights the Hulk. And then he fights Electro. And then he fights some Mexican sorceror guy who brands young women to make them his sex slaves (I think). And then...
Well, you get the picture. The stories are all OVER the place, and before long we're hit with a pair of fill-ins from writers who were apparently never heard from again. Gerber, et al return for two issues, ending the series on a totally left-field cliffhanger that promises to be wrapped up in "future issues" of The Defenders (which I believe Gerber wrote at the time). TWO YEARS LATER, Steven GRANT writes a two-part story in Defenders that wraps up every conceivable dangling plot thread from Omega, shitting all over anything that anyone could have enjoyed from the original series in the process. The end.
Omega's an interesting case. It's definitely an original, but it suffers from a serious lack of focus, and winds up as kind of an intriguing dud. I will say that I desperately wish the paperback had reprinted its lettercols -- I'd love to know what people made of it at the time. |
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